Egg

The lab-grown burger taste-tested Monday in London is billed as one way to avert a looming food crisis by freeing up the agricultural resources used to feed billions of cattle each year. Another way to avert the crisis is to stop eating animal products altogether, according to a recent study.

In fact, “we find that doing a complete radical shift away from grain-fed animals, and stop producing biofuels, that you can increase calorie availability enough for 4 billion people,” Emily Cassidy, a researcher at the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, told NBC News.

Scientists have discovered for the first time a dinosaur with shelled eggs inside her belly. The find yields insight into how dinosaurs made babies and supports the theory that modern birds and dinosaurs are close relatives.

“I don’t think too many people had expected [us] to discover a specimen that actually had eggs inside its body. It’s something we wanted to have, but it’s very surprising we actually got it,” said Tamaki Sato, a paleontologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa.

Travel brochures often use coral reef imagery to lure tourists to seemingly tranquil locales. Don’t be fooled: Reefs are anything but quiet. And that’s a welcome fact if you’re a reef fish looking for a place to settle, scientists say.

Many reef fish coordinate their egg laying with the tides. That way, their baby fish, or larvae, drift out to sea upon hatching, explained Stephen Simpson, a tropical reef ecologist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

The discoveries of two fossilized eggs from the ancient flying reptiles known as pterosaurs were announced Wednesday. The finds raise to three the number of known pterosaur eggs—the one other known egg was only announced last summer.

Until very recently, scientists wondered if the reptiles that filled the skies in the age of the dinosaurs laid eggs or gave birth to live young like mammals do.

Paleontologists in China have unearthed a 121-million-year-old fossil bird embryo that is likely the world’s oldest. (See pictures.) The bird was found scrunched in an oval-shaped space slightly smaller than a chicken egg—one of several clues that suggest the bird never hatched.

More important, scientists say, is the evidence that the embryonic bird had feathers, a large skull, and hardened bones. The findings support the notion that early birds, like dinosaurs, were well developed at birth and able to move and forage on their own from the get-go.

Reproduction success hinges on several factors, not least of which is finding a mate within the same species. While this is an easy enough task for humans, it is seemingly more complicated for brown-headed cowbirds (Molothrus ater).

The animals are one of the more than 90 known parasitic bird species, so called because they lay their eggs in the nests of other bird species and leave the chick-rearing to other parents.

A female thumb-size wasp known as a cicada killer might sound like the perfect predator to combat the billions of periodical cicadas swarming much of the eastern U.S. this May and June.

The wasp (Sphecius speciosus) paralyzes a cicada with her sting, carries it back to a chamber in her underground burrow, lays an egg on it, and seals the chamber. A few days later the egg hatches and the wasp larva eats the cicada alive.